


Summertime Sadness

by Butyoucancallmemeg



Category: Eyewitness (US TV)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Underage Prostitution, References to Depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-29
Updated: 2016-11-29
Packaged: 2018-09-03 00:07:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8688910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Butyoucancallmemeg/pseuds/Butyoucancallmemeg
Summary: Helen thinks Philip’s biggest problem is that his mother is an addict. Even putting aside the fact that Philip’s biggest problem is being one of only two witnesses to a triple homicide, his mother being an addict doesn’t even make the list.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title cred to Lana Del Rey.

Helen thinks Philip’s biggest problem is that his mother is an addict. 

Even putting aside the fact that Philip’s biggest problem is being one of only two witnesses to a triple homicide, his mother being an addict doesn’t even make the list. Philip’s mother has been addicted to Heroin for as long as he can remember. 

In the city, the seasons all blend together as a rise and drop in temperature - the beginning and the end of having to wear a jacket to school. One of his life’s few constants has always been the cyclic waxing and waning of his mother’s depression and addiction. Winter wasn’t constrained by a period of snowfall, but in the days she spent motionless on the couch; spring passed in the stretches where he wouldn’t see her for days, where she’d come home strung-out at three A.M., cash clutched in desperate fists. He’d never ask how she got it, but if it put food on their shelves he wasn’t willing to question it. 

And he’d always known that mothers weren’t supposed to be this way. He knew, in his mind and in the pit of his stomach, that the situation was backwards - wrong. He tucked his mother into bed on the days when she never got out of it. He did his best to ease the financial burdens. 

When he was young, easing the financial burden meant a five-finger discount on the single-serve packets of oatmeal, the individual sleeves of crackers on Bodega shelves, and only on the days when she wouldn’t eat unless he made her. As he got older, it became bruising his knees on dirty bathroom floors, because the rent was due, or the water bill, or the refrigerator had been empty for three days straight. When he came home with wads of cash, or groceries, or sneakers to replace the ones he’d worn holes in, his mother never asked him where he found the money. He couldn’t really blame her, but he knew then that Anne’s instinct was never to protect him, to shield him from the world, keep him safe. Not in the way that his instinct is to step between her and her coked-up boyfriends, take their slaps or their screamed berations. It’s usually coke, but sometimes it’s heroin, and once for a very short while, there was a boyfriend who did nothing but Molly. Philip’s mom doesn’t know how to find nice men. He doesn’t think she’d know what to do if she found a man who wanted her for more than just sex, a pretty face, a place to crash. Maybe the reason she’s never loved him more than drugs is that she doesn’t know what love even looks like.

(Philip knows that isn’t how addiction works. He knows that Anne loves him, and that she’s struggling under the weight of a real, physical illness.)

(Sometimes, knowing that she loves him feels like a smile that doesn’t quite reach the eyes.)

Once, the boyfriend - his name was Boyd, and he was build like a brick shithouse - threw Philip against the wall so hard his arm broke in two places. CPS took him away for three weeks, but she managed to kick Boyd out, so they returned Philip to her custody. It helped that she was the one to call the ambulance. 

In Helen’s mind, there’s probably a neat line drawn in the timeline of Philip’s life that divides it into pieces. The line is the day he got dropped off on Helen’s doorstep, with nothing but the thrift store jacket on his back and a shitty garbage bag full of his shitty secondhand clothes. Everything before it is “bad”, and everything after it, “good”. She caught the fading bruise across his cheek, the tight hold of his shoulders, and started filling in his history with needles and little empty plastic baggies, going hungry and getting hit. All things that, in Philip’s sixteen years, he’s seen plenty of. She tossed the lot of it in a box and labelled it “trauma”. She forgot about the good parts.

Philip’s summertime came in the sweet spot between when the depression let up and the drug use escalated - sometimes it was days, sometimes it was months. Anne would function. She’d snag herself an hourly job, wake up in the mornings, make him food - nothing fancy, peanut butter and jelly, or ramen noodles. Two years ago, she brought him to Williamsburg on his birthday, and they tried on hats in Brooklyn Exchange, laughed over each other as they sat in worn out old “vintage” chairs. At the end of the day she bought him a big leather coat covered in patches. He hadn’t seen his mother laugh so hard, look so young and free as she did on that day. Not long after, she hit Heroin  _ hard _ , and has hardly come up for air since. 

Philip’s problem is that he can’t put any neat label on the life he had with his Anne, because she’s his mom. He loves her.  There were days - particularly when he was young - where no piece of her was missing. She wasn’t half-high, half-depressed, half-dead, she was just his mom. She was beautiful and alive and summer lasted long into December.

Helen thinks his biggest problem is that his mother’s an addict. His biggest problem is that he’s never been enough to keep her sober. It’s that he’s always been the one to take care of her, and he’s not there anymore. 

Philip’s problem is that he hasn’t seen the sun in years.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Catch me on Tumblr, megasonicteenagedwarhead


End file.
